Erica was able to get a hold of her pilot contact, who agreed to fly us out the next day from an empty field an hour from the quarry. We opted to drive there and spend the night in Joey’s car versus risking the drive back to her apartment and being spotted. The field was deserted, but to be safe, we took shifts standing watch for anyone who might approach, no matter how slim the odds. I volunteered for the first shift, watching the road we came in on while Erica and Joey slept. Once their breathing slowed to a deep REM rhythm, I pulled my phone from my pocket and stepped outside, opening and closing the door as if it were wired with C4.
All intelligence agencies have a twenty-four-hour tip line. It was automated, of course, but after punching in a few digits, I was transferred to a live person. She sounded bored.
If Sergei was as good as I thought (hoped) he was, then their trace would bounce around a few countries before zeroing in on my location. They wouldn’t start it right away, but when they did, I estimated I had two, maybe three minutes, before their ping hit our field. Being outside the city would help, maybe buy me another thirty seconds or so.
“Thank you for calling the MI5 homeland security line. What is the nature of your call?”
“I’d like to report an assassination attempt on two of your agents, David Lofton and Lewis Reed.”
That got her attention. “Hold please,” she said. The trace was on.
A series of clicks and a new voice picked up. Older, more official. Not a station chief, but the highest ranking officer they could pull in at five a.m.
“Who am I speaking with?” he asked.
“Bugs Bunny,” I said. “Your agents are part of a task force involving Yosef and Leah Abram with Mossad, and Nadia Spencer and Frank Portis of the FBI. Something to do with human trafficking, maybe more, I’m not sure. They’ve all been targeted for elimination.” Talking fast but making sure my words were clear.
“How do you know this?”
“I’m the guy who was hired to find the hitters.” I heard him snap his fingers at someone walking past his office, who was now on a mad dash to bring others, do whatever they could to pinpoint the origin of my call.
“Who did you put on the contracts?” he asked. “Give me names.”
“The one assigned to your agents is dead.”
“Who killed him? What was his name?”
“I don’t know who killed him and his name doesn’t matter. I’m sure the other two have names, but I don’t know them. In my line of work, they’re referred to as Ghost and The Persian.”
Of course I knew their names, but this call was about saving their agents, not getting my people caught. I needed to preserve as much of my reputation as possible, or I’d have my entire roster gunning for me even if I somehow managed to survive my current situation.
There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, and then he said, “Those two names are legendary in certain circles. Many have heard of them, but few actually know who they are, let alone have worked with them. How do I know you really—”
“Ghost is Asian. He has an L-shaped scar on his chin. The Persian is a female. Persian, obviously. She paints the nail on her trigger finger black, either because she has a flair for the dramatic or she’s a big Avril Lavigne fan. Not sure which, but I’ve always hoped it was the Skater Girl.”
I could hear him wet his lips through the phone, along with background rustling that grew louder by the second. There were at least a half dozen other people in the room with him by now, maybe more.
“You can stop stalling,” I said. “If you have any kind of dossier on them at all, you know those details check out. You also know that the other four agents are likely already dead, but there’s still a chance to save yours. If you move fast enough.”
“Who hired you?” he said at last. “Give us some names and we can—”
I hung up and stopped the running stopwatch feature on my phone. It read 3:32. Three minutes, thirty-two seconds. Hopefully that was short enough to keep them guessing. It had to be. I did all I could for David and Lewis.
Next up was calls to the FBI and Mossad. The odds for their agents were not nearly as good, and with Trish’s tentacles stretching who knew how far, it was a risk calling any of them at all.
I still had to try, though. Erica was right. There were no good people in this business.
But I wanted to be the first.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Erica’s old KSK buddy turned out to be a gunrunner named Madeline. Bright red hair and the personality to match. Driving in last night, I’d doubted the ability of anyone to land an aircraft larger than a drone in the limited amount of open space before the field ran into the surrounding trees, but Madeline pulled it off with room to spare. Her next run wasn’t scheduled until Monday, but she agreed to move it up a few days as a favor to Erica. I tried to offer her the rest of the cash I had on me, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“I owe this one a lot more than an earlier flight,” she said, nodding toward Erica, who was emptying a gas canister Madeline gave her all over Joey’s car.
“What did she do?” I asked.
“Did you notice my two prosthetic legs?”
I looked down at the pair of brown boots sticking out from beneath the cuffs of her blue jeans. Hard to tell for sure, but based on the way she’d been moving, they certainly looked real. “No,” I said.
Madeline smiled. “That’s because of her,” she said, nodding to Erica. “When the IED hit our convoy and the Taliban sniper opened fire on the wreckage where I was trapped inside, my legs pinched between the seat and a jagged, bent piece of smoldering Humvee, she laid down enough suppressing fire to keep the sniper from getting off a clean shot until a chopper could fly in and get us out. Fifteen minutes with no backup. The rest of our team was killed in the explosion. It was just me and her, and I was too busy bleeding out of both thighs to help her do much of anything. It was pitch-black. All she had to go off was his muzzle flash, yet she kept that son of a bitch so pinned down he never came close to hitting us. Used every last bullet we had on us. Ever since that day, if she needs help, I don’t ask questions. And I sure as hell don’t ask for payment. I still owe her for saving both my legs, not to mention my life.”
I looked over my shoulder at Erica, but when I turned back to Madeline for more details, she had started toward the cockpit.
“That ass sure ain’t prosthetic,” Joey said behind me.
“Shut up, Joey,” I said.
Erica struck a match and tossed it onto the car, slick and dripping with airplane fuel. It went up instantly, the windows shattering from the heat by the time she made it to the plane. I gave passing thought to the possibility of the grass and weeds around it going up, spreading to the woods a few hundred yards away, but the ground was damp with dew and remnants of a brief overnight shower. It would be okay. Probably. Besides, I had bigger things to worry about.
“You owe me a new car when we get back,” Joey said. “And I want a damn BMW.”
It was roughly seven hundred kilometers to Prague, which is where Madeline was scheduled to meet her buyer in three days. A normal commercial jet could make the trip in a little over an hour. Madeline’s single-prop Cessna—bought from a local drop-zone—had been converted from shuttling skydivers to shuttling crates of black market firearms all over Eastern Europe. It topped out at a modest 150 kmph, fully loaded. That speed was dragged down even lower when adding in the extra body weight of three unplanned stowaways, so we had nearly five hours to kill before landing in a Czech field very similar to the one we’d just left.
Part of that time was spent by Erica repairing the two busted stitches in my finger and cleaning the minor cuts and scrapes on my face from my tumble off the motorcycle. If you were thinking that a night of fitful sleep crammed in the backseat of a compact car made my multitude of injuries feel any better the next morning, then I want to live in your world. Are there unicorns and fairies there, too?
